Infopeace

Strategy

The Information Technology, War and Peace Project, established with support from the Ford Foundation, tracks the effects of Information Technology (IT) on traditional statecraft and new forms of networked global politics. InfoTechWarPeace supports and seeks to extend networks of knowledge and authority that are working to anticipate, analyze and mediate conflicts enabled by global terror, hate media, information warfare, and other bellicose uses of information technology.

InfoTech Transforms International Relations

From the revolution in military affairs to hacktivism, from the virtualization of money to the digital divide, from computer code to genetic code, IT are transforming international relations. IT displays a capacity not only to collapse distance between here and there, near and far, but also between fact and fiction. The public consequences are profound.

IT played a critical role in the Gulf War, the Kosovo air campaign, and most recently and vividly, in the recent terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. IT takes many forms in international relations: network wars, computer simulations, smart weapons, sensor arrays, overhead surveillance, live-feeds, media pools, 24/7 news cycles, and other complex combinations of digital information, transmission, and storage.

IT has the capacity to actualize as well as to virtualize violence in realtime. Ranging from organized warfare to terrorist attacks to coercive diplomacy to netwars, IT enables the continuation of violence through infowar. Used by governmental as well as nongovernmental organizations, trans- and sub-national actors, and a wide variety of virtual communities, IT has also demonstrated a capability to prevent, mediate, and resolve conflicts through infopeace.

The Goal of InfoTechWarPeace

The goal of InfoTechWarPeace is to produce, through rapid internet interventions, online forums, international symposia, videoteleconferences, and documentaries, the kind of networked knowledge, critical thinking, and ethical sensibility that will help raise public awareness and inform new policies on global technological issues in war and peace.